Volume 2 / Book 5 — CHAPTER II. THE ITALIAN DECADENCE AND THE SPANIARDS.

DECADENCE OF ITALIAN CRITICISM—PAOLO BENI—POSSEVINO: HIS ‘BIBLIOTHECA SELECTA’—TASSONI: HIS ‘PENSIERI DIVERSI’—AROMATARI—HIS ‘DEGLI AUTORI DEL BEN PARLARE’—BOCCALINI AND MINORS—INFLUENCE OF THE RAGGUAGLI—THE SET OF SEICENTIST TASTE—SPANISH CRITICISM: HIGHLY RANKED BY DRYDEN?—THE ORIGINS: VILLENA—SANTILLANA—ENCINA—VALDÉS—THE BEGINNING OF REGULAR CRITICISM: HUMANIST RHETORICIANS—POETICS: RENGIFO—PINCIANO—LA CUEVA—CARVALLO—GONZALES DE SALAS—THE ‘CIGARRALES’ OF TIRSO DE MOLINA—LOPE’S ‘ARTE NUEVO,’ ETC.—HIS ASSAILANTS AND DEFENDERS—THE FIGHT OVER THE SPANISH DRAMA—CERVANTES AND CALDERON—GONGORISM, CULTERANISM, ETC.—QUEVEDO—GRACIAN—THE LIMITATIONS OF SPANISH CRITICISM.

That the Italians, who had some half of the last Book to themselves, will not have a tithe of the present, is due, on the part of the historian, neither to laziness, nor to love of contrast, nor to that rather illogical and illegitimate generosity which decrees that “the other citizen shall have his turn.” Decadence of Italian Criticism. The disproportion simply corresponds to the facts. Italy, indeed, continued to devote herself with something like enthusiasm—or at least with the engouement of dilettantism and the doggedness of pedantry—to critical studies. Some at least of the earlier writers of the century—aftercrops of the sixteenth—still exercised considerable influence: and for nearly the whole of the time the great Italians of the former age—Scaliger, Castelvetro, and others—maintained an authority which did not pass to France till the eighteenth itself was approaching. But little was really added 324to the critical canon of the central Peninsula. Paradoxers like Beni, eccentrics of different kinds like Tassoni and Boccalini, respectable compilers like Possevino and Aromatari, must occupy us and receive their due. But all these belong more or less to the first quarter of the century. The second, third, and fourth are much less fertile, and it is not till another meeting of the ages that we shall come to another really remarkable group, consisting of two at least painful literary historians, among the earliest of their kind, in Crescimbeni and Quadrio, of a real though limited critic in Gravina, and of a remarkable combination of erudition and insight in Muratori. And these will properly be treated in the next Book, not in this.

Paolo Beni, who has been spoken of in the last Book,^[408] and who was a man of nearly fifty when the sixteenth century closed, had nevertheless nearly half his literary life to spend in the seventeenth, and published the most noteworthy of his works at this time. Paolo Beni. We saw that he was a strong “Torquatist,” and an innovator in respect of recommending prose for tragedy as well as for comedy. As he grew older the iconoclastic tendency so developed in him that he may almost be called the leader of Rebellion in the matter of the Ancient and Modern Quarrel; for questa lite, as a contemporary of Beni’s calls it, had been fought out in Italy long before it became a burning one in France and England. Beni was a “modern” of the extravagant kind: and his two chief critical manifestoes, after the Dissertation on Prose Drama, were a Comparatione di Homero Virgilio e Torquato,^[409] where the author of the Gerusalemme (which Beni prefers to call by its other title, Goffredo) is exalted far above both the ancient Poets; and an Anti-Crusca,^[410] in which, with the futile courage of his opinions, he gives no more quarter to Dante and Petrarch than to Homer and Virgil on the score of language at least, and would apparently turn “modernity” almost into “hodiernity.” This does not argue any great critical spirit: and we find little in Beni—only the sort of Old Bailey advocacy, or attack, which was rapidly coming to be the disgrace of criticism. There is not “the real integrity 325and perfection of the fable” in the Odyssey. Even Virgil cannot approach Tasso in regularity, nice derangement of episodes, &c., &c. The most amusing thing about Beni is the way in which he turns the batteries of the classics on themselves. He does not attempt to make a new Poetic for Romances, nor does he take his favourite poem on its own merits and extol it for them. The “parts,” the “qualities,” the “rules” are practically adopted: and it is shown—or at least asserted—that Tasso exhibits them all in greater perfection than the ancients. This is the line afterwards taken by Addison with Paradise Lost.

The Bibliotheca Selecta of Antonio Possevino, Jesuit negotiator and teacher, is a good example of the kind of compiling work which the great development of Criticism was imposing on at least some critics. Possevino. His Bibliotheca Selecta. From some points of view it also may seem to belong rather to the last Book, for Possevino, who retired from active work in many countries to his native land and an old age of study in 1586, brought it out first at Rome in 1593. But he made alterations and rearrangements in it afterwards, and the edition I have used^[411] was published, with his own approval and assistance, a few years before his death, and well within the seventeenth century. It is a mighty folio (or rather two in one) dealing with something like the whole range of studies, and intended, it would seem, rather for teachers than learners; but the First Book^[412] has something, and the three last much, to do with our subject. In these three Possevino successively discusses History at enormous length^[413] and with considerable bibliographical information, Poetry^[414] at somewhat less, and finally the Art of Letter Writing, under the special title of “Cicero,” but with reference also to Libanius and others. Possevino, as was in fact inevitable from his profession and his purpose, is very much cumbered about orthodoxy and morality, especially in the poetical department; but he does not allow himself to be wholly guided by these considerations. Scaliger’s Poetic he 326calls spissum sane opus—a happy but rather ambiguous epithet; quotes Gambara, Minturno, Cinthio, Pigna, and Patrizzi as main authorities, and though he says that he will not quote Castelvetro, as being on the Index, evidently means that he should be read, though he duly prescribes Caro as an antidote. He has a good selection of extracts, mighty lists of books and authorities, and an inserted tract (two in fact) by Macarius Mutius on Poetry and Christian Poetry, by which he sets much store, but in which little will be found but rhetoric.

Some of the most interesting and suggestive, if not the most regular, criticism in this part of Italian literature is to be found in the Pensieri Diversi of Alessandro Tassoni.^[415] Tassoni. His Pensieri Diversi. The author of the Secchia Rapita was not likely to be dull in anything that he undertook: and his undertakings were of a sufficiently various kind.^[416] In his Considerazioni^[417] on Petrarch he treated that revered sonneteer and his sonnets as cavalierly as he was to treat the sacred Heroic Poem in the Secchia: but this kind of frondeur spirit was nothing new in Italy. The Pensieri, in which their author was candidly prepared to find people discovering “extravagance and capriciousness,” are modelled on Aristotle’s Problems, and Plutarch’s Symposiacs and Roman Questions. They deal with curious matters “such as are wont to come into the discourse of Gentlemen and Professors of Literature,” a phrase where the “and” is half complimentary and half the reverse. On perusing the contents we find that gentlemen and professors of literature talk about the radical humours, and the reason of the spots on the moon, and why it is that ugly ladies are loved, and a very great many other interesting things. They do it, moreover (at least Tassoni does it for them), in a very interesting manner—that peculiar early seventeenth-century mixture of learning, fancy, and humour which, in still greater measure, gives Burton and Browne their quintessenced charm. If Tassoni had pushed 327that question about the donne brutte home, he might have rediscovered, against his own age, the great secret of criticism; but of this we may treat more properly in the Interchapter. It is not till the Tenth Book of the Pensieri that he attacks literature, save by incidence and tangent; and then he plunges full into the Battle of the Ancients and Moderns, devoting twenty-seven out of twenty-eight chapters to an elaborate comparison of the two periods, in every class of art, science, and literature itself. But he preserves his invincible quaintness by going off in the twenty-eighth to a very elaborate study of the Hangman (Il Boia), which readers of Joseph de Maistre should not fail to compare with the Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg.

Tassoni deals with the general question in the same curious indirect and ironical fashion in which he handles the charms of bruttezza, and the reason why it was specially rude (let us say, though he does not) of Spenser to call the husband of Hellenore Malbecco. He begins by advancing, and even seeming to countenance, the “Modern” argument for Progress, as being the law of nature and so decisive of questa lite. But he very soon turns round, and gives reasons and instances for the much sounder doctrine of Fluctuation—not merely in general, but in regard to particular Arts. Therefore it is necessary to examine these Arts; and then he does this. Once more he becomes a “Modern” in awarding to his countrymen the palm of grammatico-critical studies. In Logic and Philosophy generally, he thinks they can match the Latins, and though they yield to the Greeks, may make some fight even with them. He will pit Guicciardini, Comines, and Giovio against any of the ancients, which is a little rash; putting Machiavelli with others in a second rank. And on the modern side of Oratory he urges, with his unconquerable unexpectedness, Peter the Hermit and John of Munster! But on the Poets this unexpectedness of his turns to the disappointing. He gives us a very unnecessary classification of Kinds, obviously in order that he may quote his own Secchia as a new kind, the Heroi-comic. But it is interesting to find him dividing the Commedia into “Heroi-satiric” for the Inferno, Heroic mixed with Hymnic for the Paradiso, and a division (not, as in the Inferno, a blend) 328of Heroic and Satiric for the Purgatory. Except on this head of questa lite, in which he is a notable forerunner of later disputants, Tassoni has little that is positively critical. And if he shows on the one hand a singularly active and inquiring spirit, such as may any day discover fresh and promising outlooks, he shows us also the risk of mere fantastic “problem”-raising, to which a century of active criticism was leading a century of Academies.^[418]

Tassoni’s Petrarch-blasphemies brought him into collision with Giuseppe Aromatari, of whose original work, including his part in this battle,^[419] I do not know much. Aromatari. But Aromatari was responsible, many years later, for a remarkable encyclopædia or corpus, which may very well follow the Pensieri Diversi as a pendant to Possevino’s work already mentioned, and as illustrating the learned and scholastic side. It is entitled Degli Autori del Ben Parlare,^[420] and, if its grammatical and Rhetorical divisions had been succeeded by a similar collection of Poetics, it would have gone far to cover, in a certain peculiar and limited way, the entire field of criticism. As it is, not a few of its documents extend in the poetic direction. Its first volume gives the promise of an almost unique thesaurus, starting with illustrative and comparative extracts from Hesiod, Lucian, Cicero, Xenophon, &c., then giving the whole of Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia in the Italian, and following this with Trissino’s Castellano, Tolomei’s Cesano, a discourse of Varchi, and “Opinions” from Mutio, Doni, Dolce, Citadini, and others, all on the subject of the Vulgar Tongue. Other treatises, including Bembo’s, with less famous ones by Alunno, Delminio, and others, follow; while two whole parts are given up to Salviati’s Avvertimenti della Lingua on 329Boccaccio. Not seldom the grammatical matter touches points very important indeed to criticism, as for instance in vol. vi., where Buonmattei enters on the question (made a burning one in France by Malherbe) whether popular or literary usage is to be the standard of correctness.

The Rhetorical part has the additional interest of combining ancient and modern matter—of being, in short, a kind of compressed Rhetorici Græci et Latini with modern additions. His Degli Autori del Ben Parlare. Sometimes the texts are given simply in whole or part—Aristotle, Longinus, Hermogenes being thus treated—while an Introduction to Hermogenes by Giulio Camillo Delminio shows how strongly the authority of that master was working, and how much it had to do with the insistence on criticism by Kinds and Qualities. Sometimes a catena of authorities on particular matters is given—as in the case of Tropes and Figures, where the chain stretches from Quintilian to Mazzoni. Only specialists, probably, will care to investigate profoundly the huge commentary-paraphrase of Panigarola on Demetrius Phalereus, readjusted to the purposes of sacred Oratory, though the book had a great vogue in its day. But one turns with more interest to the work of Patrizzi on Rhetoric, much less known as it is than his Della Poetica and Della Storia. It has, however, hardly any of the interest of the Poetica, being almost entirely devoted to the subjects of the orator, and philosophical rather than literary in its handling. But this great medley of Aromatari’s shows us, better perhaps than any single book except Baillet’s, and nearly fifty years before it, the bulk and importance of the position which the critical consideration of literature was taking among literary studies.

The literary side of Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnasso^[421] is less than the political. Boccalini and Minors. But the list of seventeenth-century treatises in Italian on critical subjects is long.^[422] Some of them are difficult to procure out of Italy, and I doubt whether many are worth the trouble of hunting down. I am sorry that the work of Chiodino da Monte-Melone^[423] has hitherto 330escaped me, because of the extreme beauty of the name, which would seem to qualify its author for the post of Chief Rhetorician to Queen Pintiquinestra. Pellegrino, Fioretti, Zani, Querengo, Menzini have not been or shall not be forgotten. But I have experienced, and fear again, the sort of disappointment which occurs when, for instance,^[424] one is told, of Carlo Rinaldini,^[425] that the third part of his Philosophia Rationalis “contains a tolerable Poetic.” One attacks the mighty double-columned folio, and finds a purely scholastic treatise of the familiar kind, beginning with Poetice, Poeta, Poesis, Poema as of old. It is impossible to say Non debes quadrillare in this fashion—the company is too ancient and venerable; but it is permissible to decline to play, on the strength of having had enough of the game already. There is a certain established conformity of propriety between times and books. At no time can a frank commentary on Aristotle be out of date or out of place; at this time the Poetics of Le Bossu and Bouhours, faulty as they are, were at any rate responsive to the form and pressure of the day. But such work as Rinaldini’s, however respectable, has neither the intrinsic excellence which conquers time, nor the fleeting but real grace of temporal congruity.

The Ragguagli di Parnasso themselves are of less importance to us for their actual critical utterances (which, as has been said, were not Boccalini’s first object) than for the extraordinary influence which they exercised on the form of criticism throughout Europe for more than a century. Influence of the Ragguagli. Suggested more or less directly by Lucian (whose enormous effect on modern European literature, though of course never missed entirely by any competent person, has never yet been fully allowed for) they hit the taste of the day straight and full. Not merely did they start the whole fleet of “Sessions of the Poets” and the like in England, but they had a great influence on the English prose Essayists of the early eighteenth century;^[426] while in France even the severe Boileau paid them unacknowledged royalty. It is no uncommon experience to find that books which in this way 331create a kind of “rage” at one time, become chiefly sources of boredom at another; but Boccalini certainly illustrates the fact, in his literary portions at any rate. He deserves some credit for having made current, if he did not invent, the famous story of the choice between Guicciardini and the galleys. There is some critical appropriateness in the fable of Tasso being refused admission by Castelvetro on the alleged strength of Aristotle’s rules, of the reprimand bestowed by Apollo on the philosopher, and of his excuse that he never meant his observations for “rules” at all. To this the age might have paid more attention than it did. But one finds thinness in the fun of Justus Lipsius attacking Tacitus for impiety, and of Thrasea and Priscus being warned, as they value their stoical characters, not to go and see Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara too often.

In the History of Taste as distinguished from that of Criticism the important point of the Seicento is of course that development of floridity—of Marinism—which is associated in literary history with the very term. The set of Seicentist taste.But this development was common to Italy with all Europe; and though the country still exercised a sort of prerogative influence, “Marinism” is not so much the mother as the elder, and not by so very much the elder, sister of Gongorism in Spain, of the extravagances of the age before Boileau in France, of the “metaphysical” fashion in England. It will be better to treat these in the Interchapter, both in themselves and as fastening “correctness,” by way of reaction, upon Europe.

Spain has never ranked very high in the general estimate as a contributor to European criticism: and though this estimate has not been too solidly founded, the communis sensus seems here to have exercised that mysterious power of appeal to the world-spirit which so often keeps it from going hopelessly wrong.^[427] Spanish criticism—Highly ranked by Dryden? There is, 332however, one remarkable piece of testimony which, if it were a little better authenticated, would give Spanish critics a very high position as teachers. We shall see in a future chapter that Dryden (as has indeed been generally, though, until recent times, but vaguely, allowed) is himself one of the great turning-points of the critical story of Europe. Now Spence says that Bolingbroke told him that Dryden had assured him that “he got more from the Spanish critics alone than from the Italian and French and all others together.” Unfortunately Spence speaks at second-hand; and Bolingbroke, even if he really did say this, is always a Bardolphian security. Moreover, Dryden, who was not at all in the habit of concealing his indebtedness, but, on the contrary, seems to have “felt an innocent warmth” of pleasure in mustering and marshalling his authorities, quotes no Spanish authors. And the references (which are fairly numerous) to Spanish plays in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy neither quote, nor necessarily show knowledge of, Spanish critics at all. It has been thought that Dryden may have read Tirso de Molina’s Cigarrales (v. infra); and it has occurred to me that something in his attitude may have been derived from Lope’s Arte Nuevo de hacer Comedias. But I do not believe this to be at all certain, or even very probable.^[428]

333Intrinsically, however, Spanish criticism before the eighteenth century, though not extraordinarily rich nor furnishing any documents of extreme importance, is interesting, and in one point almost supremely so, for circumstances if not for contents. The Origins—Villena. The trail begins fairly early, though the scent is scattered at uncommonly long intervals. A glance was made towards the close of the first volume of this book at the actual beginnings. They were due to two persons of the greatest distinction in the early fifteenth century—Enrique, Marquis(?)^[429] de Villena and Master of Calatrava, of the blood royal both of Aragon and Castille, and Iñigo Lopez de Mendoza, Marquis of Santillana. The Arte de Trobar^[430] of the former, a treatise on the Gay Science, was sent by him, a year before his death, in 1434, to the latter; and Santillana himself touched criticism, or at least Poetics, both in the Preface to his Proverbs, and still more in a letter to the Constable (Dom Pedro) of Portugal, written about 1455, not long before his own death, and containing observations not merely on Poetry in general, but on early Spanish poets up to his own times. This document was fortunately, and most wisely, prefixed by Sanchez to his collection of the older Spanish poets, and is easily accessible in the re-edition of Ochoa,^[431] or in the Appendix to Señor Menéndez' History, vol. ii.

The Marquis begins, after compliments, by the usual generalities about poetry containing “useful things covered with a very pretty coverlet, composed, distinguished, and scanned in certain number, weight, and measure.” Santillana. So “as 334fructiferous gardens abound and give convenient fruits,” &c., &c., with Tully to give security. But for all his own very pretty coverlet of rhetoric, the Marquis talks very good sense. He is sure that verse is above prose, basing himself soundly on Isidore of Seville and his proofs from Hebrew literature, with the Greeks to follow, and Cassiodorus to back up Isidore. Then he comes to modern times—to Petrarch and Robert of Naples, to Boccaccio and John of Cyprus, quoting the De Genealogia itself, and therefore, in a very interesting way, gearing on Spanish criticism, even in these its rudiments, to Italian, then not much less rudimentary. He divides styles properly into “sublime,” “middle,” and “low,” liberally placing all those who write in Greek or Latin in the first class. The middle contains those who write in any vulgar tongue; the low those who merely botch up romances and songs for the common people, without order or rule. Dante wrote the Commedia “elegantemente,” and Boccaccio composed proses of grand eloquencia in the manner of Boethius. Santillana then shows himself well read in Provençal, French, and Catalan, as well as Italian. He refers to the Roman de la Rose and its authors, to “Michaute” (Machault), Otho de “Crantzon” (Granson), “Alen Charrotier,” whom, naturally, he much admires. He thinks the Italians surpass the French in genius, the French the Italians in art. Then he turns to Spain, and beginning with those who have written in the Provençal style, comes to Gallegan, Castilian, &c., later, mentions the chief poets, gives the metres in which they have written, and ends with a (mis)quotation of Horace^[432] and a shower of classical allusions—among others to aquellas dueñas que en torno de la fuente Elicon incesantemente danzan. For even then the modern confusion of the Mount and the Fount had begun. The piece is, if not very advanced criticism, at any rate an early and interesting critical glance over European poetry in the Romance tongues.

Villena, as his title shows, and Santillana to some extent, had been considering Catalan and Galician as the chief poetic media 335for Spaniards; it is different with Juan del Encina, who, in 1496,^[433] prefixed an Arte to his Cancionero nearly half a century after Santillana wrote, and almost as long after an earlier Cancionero, that of Baena, the compiler of which does not seem to have been tempted to criticism. Encina. The nine chapters of this deal with the origin of Castilian poetry, the distinction between the art of poetry and the arte de trobar, while both have an art; the necessities of the trobador, feet, consonance and assonance, verses and couplets, poetic “colours,” &c., and a general conclusion on writing and reading poetry. The book shows a certain Italian influence which distinguishes it from earlier work; but which, when that Italian influence had been repeated in stronger dose, seemed to later generations insufficient and out of date. Still, it is interesting, and earlier than anything of the kind in vernacular Italian.

Another half-way house may be found in the interesting Diálogo de La Lengua or de Las Lenguas^[434] of Juan de Valdés, which has even been called “an important monument of literary criticism.” Valdés. It is rather, however, linguistic than literary, though the author deserves to rank with other national heroes of the time for his strenuous support of the vernacular, which he thought a more “corrupted” representative of Latin than Italian, and respecting which he held the odd but characteristically Renaissance notion that Greek, not Basque, was its remoter ancestor. He mentions the romances and the Celestina.

But the regular course of technical and elaborate Spanish criticism does not begin, after these long preliminary stages, till quite the close of the sixteenth century. The beginning of regular Criticism. Humanist Rhetoricians. The earlier course of that century has indeed supplied Señor Menéndez with a 336tolerably fair herd of humanist rhetoricians to fill the ninety pages of his ninth chapter. The list is headed by Antonio de Nebrija (Nebrissensis), De Artis Rhetoricæ compendiosa coaptatione ex Aristotele Cicerone et Quintiliano, in 1529. But the only names of much interest that appear in it are those of the famous Luis Vives, disciple of Erasmus and of Oxford, with his anti-Ciceronianism, and with at least some admission (the passage is quoted by Señor Menéndez at vol. iii. on p. 226 from the De causis Corruptarum Artium), that it does not matter in what language a man writes in so far as faults and impurities of diction and the duty of avoiding them are concerned; and of the equally famous preacher Luis de Granada, with his Rhetorica Ecclesiastica, a good deal later. Still, the metrical Rhetoric (1569) of Arias Montano, that “Lope of Latin verse,” a piece of didactic much more spirited and really poetical than Vida’s Poetic, on which no doubt it is modelled; and the vigorous if mistaken scholasticism of Francesco Sanchez (“El Brocense”), in his attempt to subject Rhetoric entirely to Logic, deserve some notice. So, perhaps, does Alfonso Garcia Matamoros, who, though Señor Menéndez conscientiously suspects him of not being very original, stumbled upon a remarkable anticipation of Buffon in the definition Est stylus habitus orationis, a cujusque hominis natura fluens. This is a slight but distinct advance on the earlier one of Fox Morcillo, De Imitatione (1544), which gives it as something quæ vel pro ingenio cujusquam, vel rei, quæ in questionem vocatur, ratione varietur. These writers, however, seem (except El Brocense, who dealt on more than one occasion with the Horatian Art) to have given little or no attention to Poetics, and in fact to have allowed themselves to drift a good deal to leeward of the purely literary side of Rhetoric altogether. When the ship bore up again for this side, the Spaniards, like everybody else in Europe without exception, took the Italians for their schoolmasters; and they might seem all the more certain to be docile pupils in that their poetical practice—their practice indeed in all sorts of regular writing—had long been under the same influence. Boscan had more or less deliberately Italianated 337Spanish poetry^[435] half a century before Rengifo,^[436] and Pinciano, and La Cueva, in the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first of the seventeenth, began to theorise. At the same time there was a very important point of difference between Spain and all other European nations, except to some extent England. In the contents of the Cancioneros—perhaps not in actual form very old, but stretching back by tradition and association to the very blending-time of Goth, and Cantabrian, and Latin—and in the drama which had been so rapidly maturing from Naharro to Lope de Vega, the Spaniards had two mighty, popular, and intensely anti-"regular" forms of literary composition. The critical “dependence” therefore—the point to be fought out—was, “Which was to prevail?”

Mr Spingarn’s thesis, that translation of the Epistle to the Pisos is the invariable prelude of original critical work, completes its proofs, as far as the Latin races are concerned, by the version of Espinel which appeared in 1591, and was followed in the very next year by Rengifo’s Arte Poética Española. Poetics. Rengifo. Of the former there is little to say, for though Espinel was a man of literary gift (he was the author, it may be excusable to remind the reader, of Marcos de Obregón, and so a slight, though only a slight, creditor of Le Sage), he did not add anything original to his translation. The latter has been sometimes rather unkindly spoken of by those who do not like formal Arts of Poetry. Those, on the other hand, who have weak places in their hearts for such things may give Rengifo shelter therein. He reminds one at very first sight of his Italian originals in the comely small quarto of his format—the book-size of all others which retains a certain dignity without entirely forfeiting the benefit of the Archpriest of Hita’s celebration of dueñas pequeñas: he has a beautiful folding plate of a 338Labyrinto—one of the artificial forms which are dear because they maddened the eighteenth century—and he gives a large Sylva or rhyming dictionary. I do not know that there is much else to be said for him, but he is a symptom.^[437] So, some twenty years later is, on the other side, the severe Cascales,^[438] who in his Tablas Poéticas^[439] lays it down that “if any part of a fable can be changed without loss, this fable is not well managed.” There was a contemporary of Cascales in a country which loved not Spain, neither was loved of her, who would have changed you every part of every one of his fables, and left the versions so that you could not tell which was the better.

Some years after Rengifo came Pinciano, and ten years later the Spanish attempt to rival Vida and Vauquelin in the Ejemplar Poético of Juan de La Cueva. Pinciano. The two are opposed on the point which was rapidly becoming the burning question of Spanish literary criticism, but which was never thoroughly faced in Spain. The great national drama—in main part, if not in every respect, Romantic to the core—was making progress every day; but so was the theory that you were to follow the ancients. Alfonso Lopez, otherwise “El Pinciano,” did the latter diligently in his Filosofía Antigua 339Poética,^[440] which, besides the authorities indicated in the title, owed much to the Italian school.

Pinciano^[441] is set extraordinarily high by the Historian of Spanish criticism, who thinks him “the only humanist of the sixteenth century who presents a complete literary system,” contrasts him (I own that this gives me pause) with the “intolerable pedantries” of Castelvetro, and calls him plumply “an excellent critic.” The quotations advanced, though, according to Señor Menéndez' admirable custom with authors difficult of access, they are plentifully given, will perhaps hardly justify this praise. Pinciano thinks that “the soul of poetry is the fable”; that metre is not necessary, though it “perfects imitation”; that imitation itself must have verisimilitude; that poetry is superior to metaphysic; that it ranges over all the arts and sciences; that it gives things in a new form, makes them new to the world; that a perfectly organised fable is like a perfectly organised animal; that it is absurd for a hero to be born, grow up, become bearded, marry, &c., all in one piece. He prefers the probable-impossible to the improbable-possible, disapproves of classical metres, and so forth—all of which we have, I think, heard before. Señor Menéndez attributes to him altísimo entendimiento crítico for rejecting the common (and certainly absurd enough) division of comedy and tragedy by the happy or unhappy ending, and vesting the comic element in Ridicule. And he winds up by constituting Pinciano, with Cascales and Gonzales de Salas, “the luminous triad of our preceptists of the good age.”

Recurrence to, and study of, the book itself as given by Señor Peña will not, I think, remove the doubts about this high estimate of the Filosofía which even Señor Menéndez' own quotations may have started. It is a book of much learning, ingenuity, and labour, the somewhat non-natural 340form of which (the recounting in letters to a certain Don Gabriel by El Pinciano^[442] of conversations between himself and two friends, Hugo and Fadrique) may, like much else in it, be due to Italian influence. That of such writers as Fracastoro is obvious in the philosophical aloofness of the first Epistle-dialogue, De la Felicidad Humana, in which the nature of virtue, the character of the Pagan divinities, and many other solemn things are discussed, with some curious ones, such as whether nobleza can be predicated of Lais either for her beauty or her eminence in an oficio deshonesto. It is Don Gabriel’s answer which deflects the subject with some sharpness into una Arte Poética en romance, and this, beginning in the next letter, occupies the rest of the book. The divisions are pretty usual: first, the general qualities of, and objections to, Poetry; then its nature, its different kinds, the Fable, Poetic diction, metre, tragedy, and comedy; dithyrambic, epic, minor poetry; and lastly, “Actors.” Pinciano calls these divisions modestly enough Fragmentos, but no just exception can be taken to them on the ground of scrappiness. The book is methodical enough; its aperçus (as, for instance, on furor poeticus and poetic diction) are often acute, and its expression not seldom has the quaint raciness of Spanish.^[443] But it still “sticks in generals”; it still holds those generals to have been settled once for all of old; and it still gives no sign of any catholic examination of actual poetry.

On the other hand, La Cueva,^[444] though meticulous enough, and citing with high reverence^[445] not merely Aristotle and Horace, 341but Scaliger himself, Vida, Minturno, Viperano, and others, is, on the drama at least, and especially on comedy, an utter contemner of the ancient doctrine. La Cueva. My friend Mr Hannay’s pithy statement^[446] of this Spanish point of view has already commended itself to good judges,^[447] and it seems to sum up the whole matter. “The theatre was to imitate nature and to please. Poetry was to imitate the Italians, and satisfy the orthodox but minute critic.” There had been something of this in Castelvetro; there was more in the Spaniards, and it was fatal to them as critics.

Carvallo.

Of the authors of this group with whom I am myself acquainted, none seems to me to stand higher than Gonzales de Salas on the Aristotelian-Senecan side; while few exhibit rehashings of the common stuff to be found in all the Italian books more strikingly than Carvallo in his Cisne de Apolo.^[448]

Gonzales de Salas,^[449] on the contrary, strikes me as having shown distinct and original critical power. Gonzales de Salas. A foreigner is not likely to be greatly disturbed, even if he be a better Spanish scholar than I am, by the “palpable” darkness,^[450] the “accumulation of obscurity and troublesomeness” in style, with which Señor Menéndez reproaches Salas. It is an odd thing, but might be paralleled elsewhere, that the foreigner, who does not know what the man ought to have said in order to convey his meaning properly, can, in nearly all languages, arrive at that meaning more easily than the native, who is “put off” by eccentricity and barbarisms. Words, for instance, like lucifugas and parasangas, which Don Marcelino holds up to special reproach, are to an Englishman, with his Virgil and his Xenophon in his head, perhaps easier reading than some of the bluest-blooded words of pure Spanish. The critic is further 342enraged by Salas’s devotion to Seneca, whose Troades he actually translated, with observations and exercitations thereon. But (as students of English at least should know) there is much Romantic virtue in your Seneca along with his Classical vice. The curious thing about Gonzales is that—fervent Aristotelian as he is in theory, and devotee of the ancient theatre down to the Tragic Boot—he has singular “pluckings of apples by the banks of Ulai,” strange glimpses of the truths which his countrymen were the best situated of all men in Europe (with hardly the exception of Englishmen) for seeing, but which as a rule they would not see. Both Pinciano and Cascales had eulogised Nature or Naturaleza; but as the foundress or foundation of Laws which Cascales at any rate would have as those of the Medes and Persians. Gonzales, Aristotelian as he is, on the other hand, says in so many words,^[451] “You are not bound to follow the ancients,” “Time and taste may improve and alter art.” Señor Menéndez thinks this liberty a Spanish trait; but we find it in some Italians, though not many, and we certainly do not find it in all or many Spaniards, who are much rather inclined to divide their attentions, or, as the impudent old Greek definition has it, “to keep the wife for convenience and decency, the mistress for pleasure.” Gonzales, I think, saw a higher law.

These authors, however, and others who succeeded them, though worthy wights and good workers in labouring the lea of Spanish criticism, in no case possess the interest which attaches in all literatures to those who are at once eminent in creation and careful in criticism. The place of Corneille in French, of Jonson and Dryden in English, is taken, earlier than any of these, by one of the great and three of the greatest writers of Spain—Tirso de Molina, Lope, Cervantes, and Calderon.

The contribution of the “creator of Don Juan” to criticism is not large, and it comes in an odd place, but it is of importance. In the curious medley called Cigarrales [say "tales of a country-house"] de Toledo,^[452] Tirso has included a play of his 343own, El Vergonzoso en Palacio, and has given us a discussion of it by the company at p. 184 of the book. The Cigarrales of Tirso de Molina. A “presumptuous person” attacks the poet for “licentiously deserting” the limits and laws of comedy. He has stated the strict Unities, and is contrasting the action of the play with them, when he is interrupted by a certain Don Alejo, who carries the war into the enemy’s quarters bravely. Comedy must be ended in twenty-four hours, must it? It is quite decent and probable, is it not, that a gallant shall fall in love with a lady, court her, treat her, win her, and marry her all in a day? Where are all the delightful accidents of love—the hopes and the despairs—to go? A real lover must be proved by days and months and years of constancy. Why may not comedy present to the eye what history presents to the understanding—much time in little? The ingenuity of the playwright consists [I abbreviate here a good deal] in making things probable as they are related. The very difference of nature from art is that the one, from its creation, cannot vary—a pear-tree always producing pears, an ilex its own acorns, influenced only by soil, climate, &c. But drama varies its own laws, and grafts tragedy on comedy. And he then boldly sets Lope, to whom he gives the title of reformador de la comedia nueva, as an example of modern art against Æschylus and Euripides and Seneca and Terence, explaining the dramatist’s declaration, v. infra, that he had deserted the ancients to please the Popular taste, as due only to his natural modesty. This is real plain speaking: and the speech is worthy of the author of the Burlador de Sevilla and the striking Condenado por Desconfiado.

Tirso’s apology for his great craftsfellow was not more superfluous than his defence of him was bold and well framed. Lope’s Arte Nuevo, &c. Not merely in the verse Arte Nuevo de hacer Comedias,^[453] 344but elsewhere, does Lope make the somewhat undignified and pusillanimous, but, as we have said, widely entertained, excuse referred to. Señor Menéndez himself can only plead (a little obviously, perhaps) that “there were two men in Lope,” the great popular Spanish poet, and the educated versesmith, full of academic tradition. Very much the same mixture is seen in Dryden, from whom, as we shall see, inconsistencies quite as great as Lope’s, and much more numerous, can be quoted. But the contrast, I think, brings out the characteristic weakness of the Spanish critical spirit. Its historian admits frankly that there is a good deal in Lope that is “infantine.” I should add that he seems to me never to have taken any side of criticism with seriousness, whereas Dryden successively took many. Both had to confess that they had been sometimes traitors to their own best ideals of poetry, to please the multitude; but Dryden, at least, never committed the blasphemy of condemning his own best things as Lope did, and thanking God that he himself knew the precious “precepts,” according to which he did not write them. The simple fact seems to be that a man of Lope’s extraordinary facility and fecundity could not be critical. In the time that Dryden took to write Alexander’s Feast the Spanish poet would have done you an Epic, half-a-dozen plays, and minor poems enough to fill a volume. Señor Menéndez himself avows that he cannot pretend to be acquainted with all the critical remarks interspersed in Lope’s enormous and never yet collected work: and who shall venture to rival his extensive knowledge? But we shall probably not be rash in thinking that any real doctrine, except on details of craft, would be hard to extract from them. The man was a genius, but not a critical genius: and it certainly was within the resources of a very humble critical faculty to note, as it is his chief critical glory to have noted, in theory, as he expressed it in practice, the fact that “Points of honour move all people mightily” on the [Spanish] stage.^[454]

345The tractate consists of not quite 400 hendecasyllabic lines, arranged in irregular stanzas from five to fifty lines long, and blank except for the last two lines of each stanza, which form a rhymed couplet. It has a rather erudite air at first sight; but M. Morel-Fatio has ruthlessly shown that almost all, if not all, the passages which give it this appearance are translated literally from Robortello^[455] or from Donatus. It begins by a complimentary address to the Academy of Madrid, which had, it seems, asked the poet for the treatise, and then passes into the slightly ignoble apology-boast, already referred to, as to his own knowledge of the preceptos and the barbarism, the rudeza, of the established and popular notion of drama. He defines comedy as imitating actions and manners of men—not royal and lofty actions like tragedy, but humble and plebeian—gives an exceedingly perfunctory sketch of Spanish, and a much fuller one of ancient, drama, and then relapses into his exercises and denunciations of

“La vil chimera deste monstruo cómico,”

with a promise to “gild” the error of the vulgar, and discover, if possible, a sort of via media. But one is not surprised to find that he has almost directly to blaspheme one of the very chief of his revered preceptos by admitting that

“Buen exemplo nos da naturaleza”

of the mixing of the tragic and the comic. So, too, like a new Naaman, he bows in the House of Rimmon by admitting that the Unity of Time must be broken, though you are to hide the breach if you can. Minor details of dramaturgy fill a large part of the piece, with an especial recommendation of keeping the interest of the audience on the tenterhooks. But he cannot finish (the finale includes a boast of having written 483 comedies

“Con una que he acabado esta semána”)

without another ungracious fling at the “vulgarity” and the “barbarism” of the Muse he serves, and a confession, in which some have seen humour, that all the 483, “except six,” 346sin gravely against true art. Certainly humour is not an unknown quality with Spaniards; but it cannot be said that, if Lope uses it here, he uses it gracefully.

Still Lope, if not very critical himself, was the cause of some noteworthy criticism from others. His assailants and defenders. From the lively controversy which arose over the character of his work, Señor Menéndez has extracted some documents, so exceedingly rare, that in one instance, at any rate, they consist of a unique copy of a reply to a libel, the original of which has perished altogether. This is the Expostulatio Spongiæ (1618) (the original and lost attack on Lope having been called Spongia), by a Julius Columbarius, who seems to have been the shadow of several gentlemen at once, the chief of them Lope’s friend, Francesco López de Aguilar. Appended to this is a dissertation by Alfonso Sanchez, professor of Hebrew at Alcalá, in which the clear method and universally intelligible Latin of the schools are utilised to put part of the Romantic case, as it was seldom put before the end of the eighteenth century. “Nature,” says Sanchez, “gives laws; she does not accept them.” Spaniards are men, and, for the matter of that, Roman citizens as well. And times change: and, for all our worship of Cicero, he would be a dinner-bell^[456] if he orated in the Theatre of Alcalá. Let poetry follow the requirements of its time. Another of these documents is the Apology for 347Spanish drama, prefixed to a collection of plays by Valencian authors in 1616, and signed by Ricardo de[l] Turia, a nom de guerre not yet certainly identified, which is a special defence of Spanish comedy (i.e., “drama”) as such.

In face of these remarkable utterances (which could be multiplied greatly, and the answers to them supplied) it may seem hard, if not altogether unjustifiable, to limit the importance of Spanish criticism, as has been done above. The fight over the Spanish drama. But it has to be observed that all this was a merely passing, and in great part a merely personal, literary dispute, which had no real effect. While the great Spanish dramatists lasted, the drama was popular, and men invented reasons to defend it. But they founded no school, either acceptedly orthodox or strong-reasoned in its heterodoxy: and, when the great age passed, instead of a sounder criticism, as in Dryden’s case, founding itself upon the results, the formal and petrifying neo-classicism of Luzán froze all these reasonings up, just as Boileau had earlier frozen those of the Ogiers and the Saint-Sorlins in France. If we could validate that connection between Dryden himself and the Spanish critics, it would be something like a Missing Link: but we cannot.

The author of Don Quixote and the author of the Vida es Sueño contribute more irregularly to our matter. Cervantes and Calderon. The chief critical documents furnished by the former are the long poem of the Viaje del Parnaso, and not so much the world-famous passage of the burning of the romances of chivalry in Don Quixote, as the whole problem and purpose of that immortal book itself.^[457] The Viaje,^[458] putting aside the debated question of its literary value, is rather a disappointing book, in its allegory of the poetic ship, with glosses for portholes, and tercets for sweeps, and its endless, but rather pointless, citation, generally flattering, but sometimes the reverse, of poets and poetic kinds. Both praise and blame 348appear to be distributed very much on the principle of Miss Edgeworth’s Frank, when he proposed to give the odd piece of tart to good Henry, who had mended his bat, or to kind Edward, who had lent him his ball. As for the burning question of the libros de caballerías, Cervantes was beyond all question right in preferring Amadis and Palmerin; but it must be a very matter-of-fact reader who does not see that in fact he loved them all, however he might laugh at them. Indeed, the scene itself (D. Q., I. i. 6), though it ends in almost the whole library being left to the untender mercies of the housekeeper and the niece, makes constant exceptions both in favour of the romances themselves (including even such a dubious example as Tirante the White) and of other pieces in verse and prose from the Diana to the Araucana. And when the subject is taken up again much farther on (I. iv. 21) by the Canon of Toledo, his severe strictures on the Romances as they are change suddenly into a splendid panegyric of what they might be. This latter passage indeed shifts into one of the most remarkable of Cervantes’ critical deliverances, the attack (in rougher language than Lope’s own) on “irregular” plays, and the famous and very curious passage in which, immediately afterwards, the curate condemns the improbabilities of the chronicle-drama in words almost precisely similar to those which Sir Philip Sidney had used twenty years and more earlier, and adopts the whole “preceptist” view, with a special reference to Lope’s own compromises and a demand for rigid licensing of plots and romances alike, according to the principles of taste and learning, of Tully (secundum Donatum) and “eloquence.” One may entertain a passing doubt whether the chances of Don Quixote itself would have been altogether happy under such a censorship; and in this there is probably more following of the Italians^[459] than deliberate critical preference. It, however, and other things (the famous contention that epics may be written in prose as well as in verse, though important from its actual illustration 349in the Don and its effect on Fielding, is in no sense original, and as an opinion hardly more than an echo of Scaliger) no doubt give Cervantes a certain status. But Calderon can hardly be said to give us anything except the odd inconsistency (to be paralleled, though in a different kind, with Lope’s) of his alternate ridicule and patronage of the Gongorist style.

This last name introduces us to another controversy, which, though connected in the most intimate way with our subject, is a sort of appendix to it, and one of those appendices which, in some cases, one must ruthlessly cut short. Gongorism, Culteranism, &c. The quarrels over Lope (whom, by the way, Góngora himself savagely attacked) were succeeded by the battle of culteranismo, again distinguished by that curious see-sawing which, as we have seen, marks the Spaniards on almost all critical points. Quevedo, for instance, and the above-mentioned Gonzales de Salas, behave like those capricious knights of Spenser’s, who were always changing sides in the battle, and running tilt at the very champions by whose side they had lately charged. Quevedo. Quevedo in particular has a most extraordinary record in this matter. I do not think that, in my limited reading of Spanish, I have ever laughed more over anything than over his Cuento de Cuentos,^[460] and his Catechism to help to translate the jargonizing ladies, where he addresses himself Al caro, diáfano, transparente e mediano Lector, gives instructions in the best manner of precious speech, and advises that a wife should call her husband mi quotidio, and he her su sempiterna, while neither will dream of speaking of a “gota de agua,” but will, of course, denominate it a podagra. Yet Quevedo at other times did more than condescend to cultism, or culteranism, as it seems to be indifferently called.

Gracián.

The great prose apostle of the cult, as Góngora was its poet, was Balthasar Gracián, who has not a little for us in his famous Agudeza y arte de ingenio,^[461] the Bible of preciosity, with its motto, En Nada Vulgar, and its doctrine (II. 49), that La semejança es origen de una immensidad 350conceptuosa tirar principio de agudeza sin limite. His name gives an opportunity of illustrating the difficulty of treating cosas de España. The limitations of Spanish criticism. I am not aware of any living English authorities on Spanish literature who can be placed above Mr David Hannay and Mr Fitzmaurice Kelly. Of these, the first says^[462] that it was Gracián’s “chosen function to be the critic, prophet, and populariser of Gongorism”; the second,^[463] that “No man ever wrote ... with more scorn of Gongorism and all its work.” Who shall decide when doctors of this degree disagree to this extent? I am, so far as my very poor and imperfect knowledge of the texts goes, with Mr Hannay: but that is not to the point.

What, I think, is to the point, and what I may say with some general knowledge of criticism, if with little particular knowledge of Spanish, is that the very nature of the subject invites, excuses, necessitates such differences. The Spaniards, if I may be pardoned a rough and ugly metaphor, never “digested themselves,” never either kept creation and criticism separate, or waited for the one till the other had ceased. Naturaleza and Agudeza jostle each other constantly in them, with a result of truceless war. One may even wonder whether cultismo, culteranismo, conceptismo,^[464] coming as they did after the great period of natural freedom, in Lope, and Tirso, and Cervantes at his best, did not do far more than the harm that the much-abused “Metaphysicals” did in English. The practice of Góngora and Gracián, even of Calderon, not seldom belied the arguments of Tirso and of the shadowy Turia and Sanchez. When a Luzán comes in such cases it is too fatally easy for him to say, “Well! whatever the ancients did, they did not do this! There is at any rate no jerigonza in Aristotle or in Horace!” And the Spaniards had no Milton, no Shakespeare to carry them through, as ours carried us through the worst times. Their Cervantes in his great work was of an “off” kind, as yet not fully recognised; 351their Lope was too fluent, facile, voluminous, unconvincing; their Calderon, with all his marvellous poetical and specially lyrical power, too unequal and perhaps too rhetorical.

Above all, they had the misfortune to have no critic of real authority. The Arte Nuevo is partly clever enough “technical education,” partly bookwork, partly ignoble or inartistic compromise: and if we compare Tasso and Lope, at no such great distance of time, we can only be struck by the enormous advantage of the Italian in serious critical weight. The others, the Pincianos, the Gonzales de Salas, and the rest, were persons, if not exactly of no mark or likelihood, at any rate of no commanding and authoritative importance, like Ben Jonson and Dryden in England, like Boileau in France. Even such comparatively slight examination of the actual texts as I have been able to give has shown me that many most interesting and independently striking aperçus, passages, phrases may be taken from the Spanish critics. But I cannot say that, even after duly perusing and perpending the admirably competent and loving examination of Señor Menéndez, I have been able to form any high opinion of Spanish seventeenth-century criticism as a whole.

352